Top 88 Sebastian Junger Quotes
#1. An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men".
Sebastian Junger
#2. One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.
Sebastian Junger
#3. Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.
Sebastian Junger
#4. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down.
Sebastian Junger
#5. War affected my family a lot, and I was quite curious about it. I first went off to war in the early 90's as a journalist, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed a career. War reporting has been very glamorous and exciting, and everything else that young men like.
Sebastian Junger
#6. The human concern for others would seem to be the one story that, adequately told, no person can fully bear to hear. Joanna's
Sebastian Junger
#7. The cause doesn't have to be righteous and battle doesn't have to be winnable; but over and over again throughout history, men have chosen to die in battle with their friends rather than to flee on their own and survive.
Sebastian Junger
#8. Of the primary emotions, fear is the one that bears most directly on survival. Children show fear. Adults try not to, maybe because it's shameful, or, in some circumstances, dangerous. The fear response is automatic, though, and your body runs through its reflexes whether you want it to or not.
Sebastian Junger
#9. The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.
Sebastian Junger
#10. Today's veterans often come home to find that, although they're willing to die for their country, they're not sure how to live for it.
Sebastian Junger
#11. War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.
Sebastian Junger
#12. The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment ... that maximize[s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being,
Sebastian Junger
#13. I was surprised how open and unguarded the military was. I expected more scrutiny, more supervision from command.
Sebastian Junger
#14. In keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others.
Sebastian Junger
#15. My wife, Daniela, and I live in an old house from 1810 with three fireplaces at the end of a dead-end dirt road on Cape Cod, so I turn the trees into firewood for us and a friend of mine sells the rest.
Sebastian Junger
#16. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us? The
Sebastian Junger
#17. A SOFT fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air.
Sebastian Junger
#18. They had not yet started out across a continent of grief that a lifetime of walking could not cover.
Sebastian Junger
#19. Firemen don't talk about whether a burning warehouse is worth saving.
Sebastian Junger
#20. How do you become an adult in a society that doesn't ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn't require courage?
Sebastian Junger
#21. The American military generally counts on a kill ratio of 10 to 1 when fighting lightly armed insurgents: for every dead American, there are probably 10 dead enemy.
Sebastian Junger
#22. Adversity often leads people to depend more on one another, and that closeness can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to.
Sebastian Junger
#23. There's no reason to do anything twice, and certainly no reason to do something that almost killed you.
Sebastian Junger
#24. When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose ... with a resulting improvement in mental health,
Sebastian Junger
#25. I've stopped war reporting. I realized that I'd answered all of my questions about war and about myself.
Sebastian Junger
#26. I think, politically, I'm pretty left-wing, and I try to be very neutral in my work.
Sebastian Junger
#27. they may have a harder time achieving the three pillars of self-determination - autonomy,
Sebastian Junger
#28. In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence, an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn't?
Sebastian Junger
#29. In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences. The
Sebastian Junger
#30. A grenade launcher will easily take out a tank; a Molotov cocktail placed in its air intake will destroy one as well.
Sebastian Junger
#31. It's fun to have money, but the more money I get, the less interesting it becomes. If you don't have very much, you have to think about it. If you are starving, you become interested in food. If you are struggling to pay the bills, money becomes tragically important.
Sebastian Junger
#32. And yet when I went to sleep, it was like I became part of some larger human experience that was utterly heartbreaking. It was far too much to acknowledge when I was awake.
Sebastian Junger
#33. Gang shootings - as indiscriminate as they often are - still don't have the nihilistic intent of rampages. Rather, they are rooted in an exceedingly strong sense of group loyalty and revenge, and bystanders sometimes get killed in the process.
Sebastian Junger
#34. No one will remember that President Obama supported the Arab Spring if it eventually fails and the region collapses back into the political Dark Ages. If we actively engage these movements with advice, with money, and, when necessary, with military force, then we get a vote in how it all turns out.
Sebastian Junger
#35. An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It is up to fate, in other words
Sebastian Junger
#36. What would you risk dying for - and for whom - is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves. The vast majority of people in modern society are able to pass their whole lives without ever having to answer that question, which is both an enormous blessing and a significant loss.
Sebastian Junger
#37. There are houses in Gloucester where grooves have been worn into the floorboards by women pacing past an upstairs window, looking out to sea.
Sebastian Junger
#38. I don't think journalists in World War II were objective about the Nazis, and I don't think they should have been.
Sebastian Junger
#39. Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.
Sebastian Junger
#40. I'm a good liberal, and I grew up in a very liberal family and had very strongly held beliefs.
Sebastian Junger
#41. At 19, your brain hasn't finished wiring itself. So the first time you have a good friend die, most people don't go through that at 19. Soldiers do. They're facing life in this accelerated, compressed form, and a lot of times, they're not ready for it.
Sebastian Junger
#42. Men, on the other hand, are far more likely to risk their lives at a moment's notice, and that reaction is particularly strong when others are watching, or when they are part of a group. In
Sebastian Junger
#43. Much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140)
Sebastian Junger
#44. If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have.
Sebastian Junger
#45. If contemporary America doesn't develop ways to publicly confront the emotional consequences of war, those consequences will continue to burn a hole through the vets themselves. I
Sebastian Junger
#46. When you're scared, you're still hanging on to life. When you're ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if you've never done it before.
Sebastian Junger
#47. I think, unfortunately, we live in a world where people attack other people and I think a legitimate rationale for war is the saving of human life, the saving of lives of people who cannot defend themselves.
Sebastian Junger
#48. I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you're supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it's not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts.
Sebastian Junger
#49. Whether ... civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested," he wrote in 1795. "[Both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized." When
Sebastian Junger
#50. Meteorologist see perfect in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm.
Sebastian Junger
#51. How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?
Sebastian Junger
#52. There are photographers who don't really engage with their subject. It's a really unfortunate phrase, but they take their photo and they leave with it. It works but I think it ultimately limits how profound the work can be.
Sebastian Junger
#53. There are no journalistic ethics that transcend the value of human life. There are none. In a situation where you can save a human life, you must. There isn't any conflict in my mind.
Sebastian Junger
#54. The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good.
Sebastian Junger
#55. Who wants a life of ease? And who wants a life in the office that you hate, and who wants to play golf?
Sebastian Junger
#56. All journalists hope that their work will inspire a broader conversation. I think that's just what journalism is.
Sebastian Junger
#58. The attacks of 9/11 came out of Afghanistan. It was a failed state, a rogue nation. That's why al Qaeda was there in the first place.
Sebastian Junger
#59. People who do really dangerous tasks can't afford to sit around and discuss the merits of what they're doing.
Sebastian Junger
#60. You don't owe your country nothing," I remember him telling me. "You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life.
Sebastian Junger
#61. Bad news is dramatic. It makes good TV. If there's a firefight on the same day that a school opens up, the media will show the firefight even though the school is way more important and will affect the community for much longer.
Sebastian Junger
#62. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs - and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought - will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.
Sebastian Junger
#63. Another study notes about Bali: "Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities." As
Sebastian Junger
#64. War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)
Sebastian Junger
#65. No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.
Sebastian Junger
#66. The coward's fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others' lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. - J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors
Sebastian Junger
#67. If you get an infection, you get a fever; the fever is your body dealing with the infection. If you get traumatized, your mind and your brain have a reaction to that trauma. If you're not dreaming about it, something's probably wrong.
Sebastian Junger
#68. I had grown up during Vietnam. I had no connections to the U.S. military, and I had a pretty cynical default opinion about the U.S. military.
Sebastian Junger
#69. I have been working since I was 20, and I'm 38. I actually once averaged out what I had made over my professional life. I think I could have made that much as a waiter or an insurance salesman. You know, I spent so many years in my 20's making $10,000 a year.
Sebastian Junger
#70. The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring president Milosevic had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo's status.
Sebastian Junger
#71. Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.
Sebastian Junger
#72. Billy's at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into meteorological hell.
Sebastian Junger
#73. Disasters, he proposed, create a "community of sufferers" that allow individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others
Sebastian Junger
#74. Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world.
Sebastian Junger
#75. Combat isn't where you might die
though that does happen
it's where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don't underestimate the power of that revelation. Don't underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.
Sebastian Junger
#76. Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and bajraks. The bajrak system identified a local leader, called a bajrakar, who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty.
Sebastian Junger
#77. So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself?
Sebastian Junger
#78. What people miss presumably isn't danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender.
Sebastian Junger
#79. It may be worth considering whether middle-class American life - for all its material good fortune - has lost some essential sense of unity that might otherwise discourage alienated men from turning apocalyptically violent.
Sebastian Junger
#80. Well, the fact that the news industry doesn't have enough money to only send salaried staff to war zones means there is an enormous, wide-open opportunity for young people who want to be on staff and don't know how to get there.
Sebastian Junger
#81. People really in the meat grinder of the front lines are not, for the most part, insured or salaried network correspondents. They're young freelancers. They're kind of a cheap date for the news industry.
Sebastian Junger
#82. It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn't willing to make sacrifices for you. That is the position American soldiers have been in for the past decade and a half. There
Sebastian Junger
#83. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don't see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you're walking in.
Sebastian Junger
#84. Because modern society has almost completely eliminated trauma and violence from everyday life, anyone who does suffer those things is deemed to be extraordinarily unfortunate. This gives people access to sympathy and resources but also creates an identity of victimhood that can delay recovery.
Sebastian Junger
#85. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
Sebastian Junger
#87. The only thing that makes battle psychologically tolerable is the brotherhood among soldiers. You need each other to get by.
Sebastian Junger
#88. PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets. But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing. Israel
Sebastian Junger
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